American Hungarian Trilogy

CHAPTER 1-2

The buildings were four or five stories high, like in most of Budapest. I now recognized the square as Felszabadulás Square with its ornate doorways of bearded gods or the heads of lions holding up an arch. Some doorways had strong women carved in stone holding up entire buildings. They were a signal, our teacher told us, that women were coming out through the portal to be part of city life. She said they were in the style of Art Nouveau, French words meaning “new art.” The other teachers thought our art teacher was off her rocker, that she was a petit bourgeois, but I could listen to her prattle on for hours.

Where I lived, the doorways were more old-fashioned. A half-naked Atlas crouched above one doorway. Our apartment was a lot scarier. A woman’s head with squirming snakes for hair guarded our gate. It was Medusa, my father told me. If you looked at her, you stood a good chance you’d turn into stone yourself. Or maybe it was salt. He said it warded off evil spirits from the streets of Budapest.

I loved my city. I loved its ornate buildings, its squares, the tree lined boulevards, the public gardens, like the one behind Heroes’ Square. The dome-shaped Turkish baths, the Chain Bridge, the elegant Opera House, courtyards ringed with galleries of cast-iron railings. The storybook Fishermen’s Bastion overlooking the Danube and the star-tipped dome and rising spires of Parliament.

Long before my art teacher, it was my father who inspired in me a special love for the city’s older buildings. You see, before the Communists came along, he used to be an architect. I was just a little girl when he’d take me around to see his favorite doorways and scrolled balconies. Old statues with broken noses. Mosaics that turned gold from the setting sun. He said he especially liked buildings that were modern expressions of Hungarian folk art, like frescoes of stylized Kalocsay tulips or mosaics made to look like embroidery.

My favorite was the Museum of Applied Arts on Üllői Avenue. Its bright green and yellow ceramic tiles and the multicolored copula with the Moorish design spoke to me of a fantasy palace somewhere in the lands of Araby.

I figured if I got kicked out of school, I could easily spend my time just walking the streets and ogling the buildings.

At the next intersection, the crowd was swallowed up by an even greater mob of people heading toward the Danube on Kossuth Boulevard, one our busiest thoroughfares.

After that last streetcar, the traffic came to a halt. I’ve never seen anything like it. All these people! I now wished my father were with me so he could see all this, be part of all this, whatever this was. It was crazy. Buses, cars, red trolleys at a standstill in the middle of the street. The passengers had no other choice but to get off and become part of the growing crowd.

I could see the Liberation Monument high on top of Gellért Hill, on the other side of the Danube. No way to cross the river. We were either going to have to stop or make a turn somewhere, because the bridge connecting Pest and Buda was blown up by the Germans during World War II. All that remained were the rusted towers with their severed arms.

The last field trip our teacher took us was to the top of Gellért Hill to see the colossal statue of a woman holding a palm leaf up to the sky. After we had eaten our lunch on the grass, she gave us a history lesson. Originally, she said, the monument was to honor Admiral Horthy’s son whose plane was shot down by the Russians during a dogfight. After the war, the Russians turned it into a Liberation Monument for their soldiers. The Russian letters on it said that the monument was erected by the grateful Hungarian people in honor of the liberating Soviet heroes. She said it appeared our liberators must like it here since they have been with us now for the last eleven years.

At the base of the monument, they added a cast-iron statue of a Russian soldier with a submachine gun looking out over the city.

Gellért Hill had the best view of Budapest. You could see how the Danube divided the twin cities of Buda and Pest before winding westward by the Houses of Parliament.

Our art teacher had us walk around the old fortress in back of the Liberation Monument. We gawked at the massive walls pockmarked with bullet holes and shell marks that looked like craters.

By this time, the jostling crowd had grown so thick, we were shoulder to shoulder and closing ranks. I could feel the breath of the person behind me.

Something told me that our art teacher would not be taking us on field trips for a very long time.

The crowd was swept along the Danube, slowed down and finally came to a halt once it got to Petőfi Square, already overflowing with what must’ve been thousands and thousands of demonstrators milling around the statue of the poet Sándor Petőfi. I knew from studying Hungarian history that Petőfi was our most famous poet.

Because I was short, I had to strain my neck and tried standing on my toes. I was shocked when a lanky young college student behind me scooped me up and propped me on his shoulder. The girls around me twittered. I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. I wanted to see, but I didn’t care for being picked up like a little kid. Once I sized up what was going on, I asked the student to put me down, thank you.

It was enough for me to catch a glimpse of a man, probably an actor, who stood on a makeshift platform in front of the statue. He started to recite a poem by Petőfi that every Hungarian immediately recognized. “Stand Up Hungarians!” This patriotic poem started a revolution in 1848 against the Austrians. Imagine a single poem doing that! The man didn’t have a microphone or anything like that, but he didn’t need one. We knew the words by heart.

The fiery verses challenged Hungarians to stand up for freedom. The poem kept repeating, “Shall we be slaves or shall we be free?!” It wasn’t long before the crowd joined in: “Free!” the crowd roared. “Free!” I heard myself shout at the top of my lungs.

University students passed out posters with a list of demands. I took one from a young man wearing a coat with an armband of Hungarian colors. Because of all the excitement around me, I wasn’t going give the poster more than a quick glance. Then I couldn’t take my eyes off it. One demand was for the release of all political prisoners. The paper shook in my hand. My father. All I could think of was my father. That my father would come home to us. Then something else caught my eye. The last demand. It called for the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Hungary.

I looked around the crowd of demonstrators. They meant business, alright. What if the Russians had no intention of going home? What would happen then? What would happen to my father? What would happen to the demonstrators? Suddenly, I got scared. I stuffed the poster into my backpack and as soon as I wormed my way through the crowd, I ran all the way home to our apartment building on Sándor Bródy Street. I was breathless when I opened the gate under Medusa’s gaze.

My mother met me in the foyer. She was angry. “Where have you been all this time?”

“The demonstrations,” I said as we headed into the kitchen where my aunt was busy pedaling her sewing machine. My aunt sized me up over the rims of her glasses. “There are people everywhere,” I plowed on. “Traffic is blocked and everything. They’re passing out posters. They’re demanding the release of political prisoners.”

“What?” My aunt took off her glasses.

By this time I had my backpack off and I pulled out the poster with the demands. “Here.” I handed it to my mother. I waited for her reaction.

Although my mother was some twenty years younger than my aunt, she was so much more serious and a lot more strict with me. I never knew whether this was because my father was gone or because she was disappointed in me. Like me, she was short, but that’s as far as it went. She had this smooth, porcelain-like skin, not one freckle. She almost never used make-up or lipstick.

Raised in a village in southern Hungary, she was a bit old-fashioned in her ways about what good girls should be doing with their time. She liked to give me chores, and, if she had her way, I’d either be in church praying or in the kitchen cleaning and cooking and baking. She did have these dreams for me of playing the accordion one day. Thank the Lord we had no money to buy one. She said I spent all my time on the streets gawking at the buildings like I had never seen them before. I had better look where I was going before I walked in front of a streetcar. She had no patience with what she called my “nonsense.”

My mother sat down on one of the kitchen chairs, glanced at the poster, shook her head in that impatient way of hers and passed it on to my aunt, who held it under her sewing machine’s little light.

My aunt read what was on the poster but didn’t say anything. Instead, she reached for a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke out of her nostrils. “Interesting,” she said. She told my mother to turn on the radio.

Nothing on but stupid music. My mother fooled with the dials but nothing was said about the demonstration. Nothing. I couldn’t believe it.

I let them know the demonstration was going to continue on the other side of the Danube. By the statue of the Polish General Bem. “Can we go? Please?”

My mother shook her head slowly and said that I was insane. That the demands were insane. “Did you read all of them? Do you think the Russians will sit back and let a bunch of greenhorn students run the country? You better think twice before getting your hopes too high.”

I told her about all the people in the streets. The posters, the chanting. Petőfi’s poem.

“Uhum. And look where he got us in 1848. It was the Russians then, too. The great Russian Empire. Don’t they teach you that in your school? They may have changed their name to the Soviet Union, but it’s still an empire. And here we are, a tiny country, challenging the great Soviet Empire. How smart is that?”

“Not very,” my aunt said, lighting another cigarette. She was a real chain-smoker.

I was on the verge of tears and fought with my mother. “You just don’t want Papa out.”

“I won’t be lectured by you about your father. He was irresponsible.” She turned to my aunt. “Well, wasn’t he?”

My aunt, who was my father’s sister, pretended she was busy with the suit she was making for my mother.

“What about your sick sister?” my mother turned on me. “Who’s going to take care of her when I’m out shopping? Your aunt? God knows how busy she is working for all of us. I told you about your father a hundred times already. Your dear father had to mouth off and get himself arrested so he could be carted off to God-only knows where. That’s a fine way to run away from your family problems. By blaming the government. What about your poor sister? You expect me to drag her through a mob so you can pretend your father’s coming back. Sorry, Kitty. I have to be responsible for all of us now. What you did today was very foolish. Very stupid. Just like your father!”